Data

Similar to Libraries or Plugins, all of the Data sources you can add to text and shape layers can be managed in Preferences.

To add a custom Data source, you’ll need to do it via Preferences. Simply click the “Add Data…” button and select the text document or folder of images you want to use as a data source, or drag it onto the Preference window. Plugins that provide data will also appear here.

Note: Make sure that the location of your images and text files are in a folder that you are not likely to move. If you add a .TXT file from your Desktop, then later move it to Documents, Sketch will not be able to find that file when you next want to apply data from that source.

Adding Text Data

For Sketch to insert custom text data to use in your designs, it must be saved as a .TXT file with each data ‘value’ on a new line.

1
2
3
4
5
6

AfghanistanAlbaniaAlgeriaAndorraAngola...

Note: Make sure your text file is actually a .TXT file and not an .RTF or other text file format with the .TXT extension added.

Managing Data

Once you have added a Data source, you can toggle its visibility, in the Data menu, by selecting the checkbox to the left of its preview. This is great for quickly managing which Data sources should appear if you work on many projects and have a lot of different sources to choose from. Clicking the folder icon to the right of added folders will reveal its location in the Finder.

When a Data source is selected in the list, you can click the cog icon at the bottom of the list to reveal some options. For the built-in Data sources these are not available but for your own custom Data sources you can choose from “Show in Finder”, letting you see where your data file is stored on your Mac, “Show Plugin”, if your data source is connected to a plugin and you can also choose to remove a Data source.

Last modified on Feb 05, 2019

Was this article useful?

Yes

No

We’re really sorry about that.Please let us know what you were looking for: